Since Steve was feeling a bit "done" with skiing, he joined me in a meander of Historic Downtown with a great visit to the Park City Museum.

This incredible place studies and celebrates Park City’s history through exhibitions, research, preservation, and educational events. They believe that protecting their history helps bridge cultural differences, honors their forebearers, improves their town’s economic vitality and nurtures a shared sense of belonging. AND it gives us an amazing place to explore.
We learned in the start of our tour about how did early settlers found their way here. After learning about the Kimball Stagecoach, which carried people and mail to Park City, we climbed aboard a re-created railcar. We "looked" out the train’s window and back through time as we watched a film about Park City’s place in the frontier West.
Oh man, then we examined the scaled, late 19th century Mega Mine.


Mining required strong backs, and wreaked havoc on miners’ lungs. We learned about the dark, wet, and dangerous profession as we explored mining equipment, learned how ore became silver,  and Steve got to experience exploding dynamite.
Park City grew rapidly in its early days and was flush with new money from silver mining. Thus, it was among the first towns in the West to benefit from new technologies becoming available at the time, including a new-fangled service that sent voices over wires: the telephone.

In 1881, the American Bell Telephone Company issued a license to the Park City Exchange Company, and Park City became only the third city in Utah to have telephone service (after Salt Lake City and Ogden). There were approximately 60 telephones in Park City by 1882!

We learned about the people and their lives in the Hey Day of mining.

This was a pretty interesting space. Its proper name is the Park City Territorial Jail, but for at least 100 years, it has been known locally as the dungeon. And for good reason. Equipped with only the bare essentials, this stark stronghold is a chilling reminder of the primitive state of “corrections” at the turn of the 20th century. Its masonry walls echoed with the curses of the inebriated, stifled the protests of union radicals and, on occasion, protected accused murderers from mobs intent on dispensing their own form of frontier justice.
We learned more about the evolution of skiing here. The miners were the first to strap on some wood planks (skis), grab their brooms (poles) and hit the slopes (to get to and from the mines).

This exhibit was beyond cool. On the hillside by Thaynes chairlift is the Thaynes Shaft, where a unique ski lift, the ski subway, debuted in 1963 with the opening of Treasure Mountain Ski Area, the predecessor to Park City Mountain Resort. Skiers boarded a specially built train (the one I'm in) that traveled three miles through the Spiro Tunnel (1916) to the base of the resort, where they then loaded into an old mine elevator to ride 1,800 feet (higher than the tallest building in the US today) to the surface.
As it turns out, tunnels are wet and most of the skiers only did this ride once before returning to the above ground gondola. One of the many surprises we discovered and enjoyed this well presented history lesson of a really great little town.

Park City might be a fairly nondescript-appearing town were it not for its colorful and evocative Main Street, where 64 Victorian buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. There are many remaining mine buildings, mine shafts (most blocked off from outsiders with large steel doors), and hoists, including the weathered remains of the California-Comstock and Silver King Mines and the water towers once used to hydrate one of the biggest mines, the Silver King, provide a hint of the history of this mining town transformed in economic upheaval into a skiing resort.